Author Archive for Bernd Harzog

Bernd Harzog

Bernd Harzog is the Analyst at The Virtualization Practice for Performance and Capacity Management and IT as a Service (Private Cloud).Bernd is also the CEO and founder of APM Experts a company that provides strategic marketing services to vendors in the virtualization performance management, and application performance management markets.Prior to these two companies, Bernd was the CEO of RTO Software, the VP Products at Netuitive, a General Manager at Xcellenet, and Research Director for Systems Software at Gartner Group. Bernd has an MBA in Marketing from the University of Chicago.

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VMware has announced its log management product – Log Insight. Log Insight is priced at $200 per monitored OS instance (per VM pricing) and is to be available in Q3 of this year. VMware’s own vSphere environment is the first targeted environment, and the first use caseis Operations Management. Right now this is clearly a 1.0 offering competing with a very mature Splunk Enterprise offering – but there are some very interesting short term and long term dynamics at play.

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The Orchestration and Automation layer of the Software Defined Data Center is where the benefits of the SDDC is translated are translated into working applications for end users and business constituents. Every Cloud Management Platform relies upon either a script or one of these automation frameworks to provision and configure the actual end user services and applications. These solutions represent an opportunity to replace first generation automation management tools and scripts with modern declarative and model based approaches that are much more manageable and scalable.

The Compuware PureStack technology is based upon an agent in the operating system (Windows, Linux, AIX, Solaris, and HPUX) that collects all of the key infrastructure metrics from that operating system. These infrastructure metrics are then mapped to the end to end transaction tracing that Compuware offers through the PurePath technology that came from the Compuware acquisition of dynaTrace.

The Cloud Management layer of the Software Defined Data Center is where the flexibility of the SDDC is translated into tangible benefits for the business constituents of the virtualized data center, the private clouds, the hybrid clouds and the public clouds. Without a robust Cloud Management layer, the IT Operations flexibility of the SDDC cannot translate into the relevant level of Business Agility for the business.

Software Defined Data Center Analytics will play a critical role in keeping your SDDC up and running with acceptable performance. Multiple real time data feeds used across a variety of management solutions represent the only viable method to keeping up with the rate of change in the SDDC.

VMware has announced the vCloud Hybrid Service. Now you can buy hybrid and public cloud services directly from VMware. This dramatically simplifies the offering and the support chain giving customers one throat to choke.

vSphere with Operations Management lets VMware use valuable and differentiated management software like vCenter Operations to make the price of vSphere free or nearly so. One can only wonder if other such bundles are forthcoming, for example vSphere with vCloud Automation Center (vSCAC). VMware has significant product differentiation in management software over Microsoft, and it only makes sense to use this differentiation to combat the perception that vSphere is expensive.

VMware has announced the End of Life for vFabric APM. This now opens up the entire data center virtualization market and the entire future Software Defined Data Center market to third party solutions designed for these new environments. This will be one more nail in the coffin of the legacy APM vendors who have not modernized their solutions, and will create a huge opportunity for the new vendors who have.

If BMC is taken private, the same fate will likely befall other legacy enterprise management software vendors like CA, and the management software divisions of IBM and HP. This will start the process of the replacement of these products by new ones built from the ground up for virtualization and cloud computing, and mark the start of the disruption of the entire management software business.